Bridges and voices

 As I emerged from a period of intense work on not one, but two books on Australian history, I found a battle going on around me about something that should be a slam dunk 'yes' vote: the Voice to Parliament.

I mentioned this to a colleague volunteer on North Head (we both do land care work), and she said the Voice referendum was just like having a referendum on whether or not to have a Sydney Harbour Bridge: a vote in favour would have enabled planning and design to go ahead, but it would say nothing about the design. It was just do we want a bridge or not?

Just as we would leave the next step to the engineers, lawyers and politicians would be the people best qualified to make the Voice work. Rabbiting on about "Oooh, we might get sued" is really saying "We are such numpties. any legislation we design will be like a dunny made of balsa wood." It is, if I may use the vernacular, bollocks.

I ducked back into history for a bit at that point. Did you know that the bridge was foretold in 1789? The sage words came from Erasmus Darwin, Charles' grandfather, who had a famous link with Sydney.

When Governor Phillip sent some Sydney clay back to London in 1789, Josiah Wedgwood created a medallion depicting Sydney Cove. An engraving of this appeared in Phillip’s The Voyage to Botany Bay along with a verse by Erasmus Darwin called Visit of Hope to Sydney Cove. Here, we see the engraving from the book. 

Now here is a portion of Erasmus' appalling version of poetry, and if you squint slantendicularly at it, you may even be able to detect the Harbour Bridge and even Manly ferries in the text:

There the proud arch, colossus-like, bestride
Yon glittering streams, and bound the chasing tide;
Embellished villas crown the landscape-scene,
Farms wave with gold, and orchards blush between.
There shall tall spires, and dome-capped towers ascend,
And piers and quays their massy structures blend;
While with each breeze approaching vessels glide,
And northern treasures dance on every tide!”

In 1815, Governor Lachlan Macquarie’s architect, Francis Greenway, suggested building a bridge from the south shore to the north shore of Sydney Harbour, but there was no real need for a bridge then. Later, when all the good farmland at Parramatta had been taken up, a few people discovered that the sandstone ridges running north had small caps of shale that made the soil good enough for market gardens, and so settlements developed along what is now the North Shore railway line.

That line opened in 1890. As soon as it did, people began building houses along it. After 1893, they could catch a train to Milsons Point and cross the harbour by steam ferry. People began talking about having a harbour crossing. Here is Benjamin Crispin Simpson's design: the caption is a link to the SLNSW original.

State Library of NSW.

In 1900, a group of politicians tried to get an agreement to a proposal that the Duke of York would lay the foundation stone for a harbour crossing while he was visiting Sydney for the inauguration of Federation in 1901, but the proposal failed to get the nod.

The talk in Sydney in 1900 was mainly about a railway bridge, high enough so that ships could go underneath it. A plan was in place by 1911, and John Bradfield was appointed chief engineer of the project in 1912. By 1916, his design was ready, but it was the middle of the Great War, so the work was delayed.

From 1900 on, motor cars, motor lorries and motor omnibuses had all become important forms of transport, as had trams. It was decided that the new bridge needed two train lines, two tram lines, and as many lanes for road traffic as possible. In the end, Bradfield allowed for what then seemed like the huge number of six traffic lanes!

Building took from 1923 to 1932, when the Bridge opened, and there was never a referendum, because everybody knew we needed a bridge, just as we need the Voice to allow us to stand among the rare decent nations of the world.

My next post will be a small excerpt from what I am pitching under the title Involuntary Belonging, a close look at indentured and enforced servitude in Australia (and even a few cases of slavery in Australia). 

If you don't think we need the Voice, that post may make you think again, as will this image, taken from the Sydney Morning Herald in 1852: